[Steve Roberts]

I’m not sure what you mean about parenting. The basic technique is to simply add the footage to the composition as a layer, and scale and position the footage layer, and keyframe that scale and position until you like what it does.

But … guessing … you could make a wide composition (“call it “wide comp”), and place the boxes within that. Then you drag the wide comp into your main comp, and animate the position of the wide comp to reveal the footage frames within.

Or, you could parent the frames to a null, and animate the null so all the frames move together.

Or, you could make the footage frames 3D, add a camera, switch off its auto-orient, then move the camera around to “find” the footage frames.

Does that help?

[Steve Roberts]

Oh, yes … since the bullet doesn’t move, I’d recommend hanging a prop bullet on fishing line on set. Then you’d remove the fishing line in post where you see it — really easy, maybe with CC wire removal.

If you wanted to do it in post, the best way would be to get a 3D tracking solution such as Syntheyes, track the move around the room, export that 3D camera info to a 3D app such as Lightwave, create a bullet in Lightwave, and composite that bullet over the shot. Of course, you’d only do that if you needed the bullet to move, explode, or do something unreal.

[Steve Roberts]

He might have gone to 24 fps because the source footage was video originally shot on film, and so it had pulldown added to make it 29.97 fps, the frame rate of NTSC video.

Pulldown takes 24 fps footage and makes it 29.97 by adding interlaced half-frames here and there. If you have that kind of footage (like most stock footage), and you want to work with the original full frames, you remove pulldown and work at the original 24 fps.

Then you render, adding pulldown to bring it to 29.97 again … if you want to go to NTSC video.

[Steve Roberts]

You know what that looks like to me?

– make a wide comp, maybe 1200×480
– make stripes on it with solids
– drag it into another comp, at broadcast size
– apply CC Cylinder to it
– animate the rotation of the cylinder (back & forth) to get the look

Haven’t found a tutorial for it … anybody?

[Steve Roberts]

You know, a little compound blur for depth of field would be cool, too.

[Steve Roberts]

I don’t have any inside info, but I’d imagine that they just had to make a garbage matte (rough mask) around the group (and their footprints, maybe), since the camera is locked off. They’d only have to draw tight masks if any guys overlapped, I suppose.

[Steve Roberts]

Note: i am assuming that the original poster is using square pixels in Photoshop for his images.

A 723×483 square-pixel image would indeed fit into a 720×480 square-pixel comp as you say.

However, I ask you to name the number of times that a 720×480 square-pixel comp would be used. As you know, 720×480 is only used in a non-square pixel context, with a PAR of .9, or more correctly, 10/11.

Consider this: a correct square-pixel comp for 4:3 TV is 640×480, 648×486 or 720×540. All those are multiples of 4×3. However, 720×480, square-pixel, is not a multiple of 4×3 — it is more like 4.5×3, which is too long.

So a 720×480 square-pixel image would not fill a DV (720×480, non-square PAR) comp, even if a few pixels were added, because it would be too long. All square-pixel images, to fill a 4×3 comp, must have dimensions that are a multiple of 4×3, at least 640×480 for DV, and 648×486 for D1.

[Steve Roberts]

Very nice!

[Steve Roberts]

Hmph. The codecs shouldn’t affect this issue.
The footage should look normally interlaced, and the text should look normally interlaced. By that I mean “consistent with your knowledge of interlacing and motion”.

Here’s a thought: are you stretching in the Output Module? Because that’s forbidden when rendering interlaced.

Here’s the normal process for what I think you want to do:
– import interlaced footage, make sure it’s interpreted lower field first (LFF) if DV, or many other formats IF YOU EXPECT TO DISTORT/MOVE/ROTATE/SCALE/BLUR the footage. Otherwise, if it is just a background clip, interpret with field sep OFF.
– drag the footage onto the “new comp” button at the bottom of the project window, to create a comp that matches the footage characteristics.
– add and animate the text
– set up a render: render LFF in the Render Settings, and choose your Avid codec for the Output Module. No scaling or cropping.

How does that compare to your process?

[Steve Roberts]

If you ever want to compare two nearly-identical renderings, drop one over the other in an AE timeline, and set the transfer mode of the upper layer to Difference. If you see something, there’s a noticeable difference. (duh) Otherwise, if you see black, the differe3nce is not really noticeable.

To see the amount of difference, with the Info palette visible, roll your mouse over the blackness. If all you see in the Info palette is RGB 0,0,0, then the two layers are identical. The deviation from zero tells you how much the two layers are different. If you want to exaggerate the difference to see it better, try adding an adjustment layer above everything, with saturation boosted through the Hue/sat effect.

This can be used to compare relative lossiness in compression.